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What role did 19th Century popular serial novels such as Wilkie Collins’ The
Moonstone play in British understandings of India?
When Wilkie Collins first wrote The Moonstone in 1868, it was not published in
the form available today, but was published in instalments in a popular
Victorian magazine, All the Year Round. Upon its first publication it was
eagerly read by the general British public, for its readership not only
included the ruling and upper classes, but the cost and availability meant that
a copy would have a wide circulation amongst all members of a household. The
tale’s images and ideas of India thus reached many social groups in British
culture.
To Wilkie Collins, the gem, part of whose history we follow in The Moonstone,
the novel of the same name, is the signifier of all things that humanity
strives for, material and spiritual. He begins the novel by demonstrating that
the history of the Moonstone gem is a history of thefts. In having his initial
narrator state "that crime brings its own fatality with it" (p.6 Ch.
IV of the prologue), Collins underscores the fact that nemesis attends every
worldly expropriator of the Moonstone, which to its temporary European
possessors is a bauble and a commodity but which to its faithful guardians, the
Brahmins, is a sacred artefact beyond price.
The Moonstone is never really English or England's, for the novel begins with
an account of its various thefts. It opens in India with Rachel Verinder’s
Uncle Herncastle's purloining the gem in battle (the opening lines are
specifically "written in India"(p.1)) and closes with Murthwaite, the
famed fictional explorer's, account (dated 1850) of the restoration of the
gleaming "yellow Diamond"(p.466) to the forehead of the Hindu deity
of the Moon "after the lapse of eight centuries"(p.466, "The
Statement of Mr. Murthwaite"). The date of Murthwaite's account of the
restoration of the diamond may be ironic, for in 1850 a Sikh maharajah, exiled
from Indian after the Anglo-Sikh War of 1848-9, presented a gem, which is
thought to be the inspiration for the Moonstone gem, to Queen Victoria at an
elaborate state ceremony in St. James's Palace to mark the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the East India Company by Queen
Elizabeth I, as this gem symbolized England's conquest of India, the Moonstone
represents England's gains from its Indian adventures
The main action of the novel takes place in the years 1848-49, at the time of
the second Anglo-Sikh War in India, which established British control over all
parts of India with great certainty. The Prologue, clearly described as
"the Storming of Seringapatam," and dated 1799, emphasizes the
historical significance of the story. An important English victory in what was
the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1789-99 distinguished the beginning of Arthur
Wellesley's rule as Governor-General, a rule characterized by ruthless
diplomacy. In fact, the victory at Seringapatam, as Collins knew, represented
the establishment of England as the major power on the sub-continent, at the
same time confirming expansion and exploitation as a company practice.
Before Herncastle acquires the Moonstone at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799,
the stone has already passed through the hands of a number “vain conquerors”. The
opening narrative transforms the sacred object into a symbol of wealth and
power that no mere mortal should possess, but which, despite its properties,
immoral warriors of various nations have sought to acquire. In fact, owning
what no one should possess merely adds to the Moonstone's allure.
The connection of the properties of the Moonstone to "ancient Greece and
Rome" (p.2 Ch. II of the prologue) is the first indication that India is
not a barbarous and backward series of petty principalities but an ancient
civilisation. The British army storming Seringapatam under General Baird, whom
we as mid-Victorian readers of All the Year Round would normally regard as the
bearer of European law, science, technology, religion, and culture are, Collins
implies, no better than those eleventh-century Moslem invaders of India, who
committed an act of wanton vandalism and sacrilege in stripping "the
shrine of Hindoo pilgrimage, and the wonder of the eastern world" (p.2 Ch.
II of the prologue). We hear of the barbarism and "rapacity of the
conquering Mohammedans" then meet Colonel Herncastle after we have been
told that the British army has converted the city's Moslem defenders into a
"heap" of corpses. In retrospect, absurd, foolish, hot-tempered, Herncastle
is ridiculous when he boasts to his fellow officers "that we should see
the Diamond on his finger" (p.3 Ch. III), for he clearly has no idea of
the dimensions of the sacred object he covets and wades through blood to attain
but can never enjoy.
Ironically, until the close of the novel, no one seems to regard the three
Brahmins as the gem's rightful custodians. While Herncastle maliciously
bequeaths the stone to Rachel Verinder, his niece, to punish the family that
rejected him, the Brahmins risk their immortal souls by masquerading as members
of a lower caste (jugglers and musicians) in order to retrieve the gem,
dedicating their lives to the service of their god. The Moonstone brings out
the worst in the worldlings that seek to appropriate it, for it brings out the hypocrisy
of the outwardly charitable, pious, and Christian Godfrey Ablewhite, desirer of
Rachel Verinder’s affections, who is unmasked in death as gross a sensualist
and hedonist as Herncastle himself. In contrast to the selflessness of the
Brahmins, sensual pleasure and self-love motivate Godfrey Ablewhite as they had
Colonel Herncastle, and frustrate recovery of the diamond.
The colourful, exotic history of the stone which becomes its meaning, both
opens and closes the novel. The story of The Moonstone is a fable, a cautionary
tale with an overt moral. The bulk of the novel is merely the European chapter
in that history. The prediction of disaster to befall each successive owner
implies that the gem's story is one of successive thefts: this prediction, based
entirely on the limitations of human nature, is a curse to all but Franklin
Blake, and the focus of his affections, Rachel Verinder. Rachel's selfless love
that prompts her to sacrifice her honour for the sake of her beloved (whom she
mistakenly believes to be a thief) parallels the religious dedication of the
Brahmins, so that romantic love becomes the Western equivalent of Eastern
reverence. Just as the holy men recover the diamond to restore the powers of
their deity, so Franklin Blake recovers Rachel's respect, lost for a time
through a plausible, but inaccurate, error in judgment based on seeing but not
understanding. The Moonstone becomes a catalyst for emotional and moral growth
for the only Europeans who have not coveted it.
Returned to its proper guardians, then replaced in the forehead of the Moon
god, the Moonstone once again becomes a metaphysical rather than a material
signifier. Only at the end is the reader compelled to see the death of Godfrey
Ablewhite as poetically just and the Brahmins as heroic conservators capable of
great personal sacrifice: they have "forfeited their caste, in the service
of the god. The god had commanded that their purification should be the
purification by pilgrimage" (p.465 "The Statement of Mr.
Murthwaite"). Having been constantly together their entire lives, the trio
depart in separate directions: "Never more were they to look on each
other's faces."(p.465) With the exception of the lovers, Rachel Verinder
and Franklin Blake, who always esteemed each other rather than the diamond, the
Western "possessors" of the stone we now regard as thieves,
charlatans, and fences. Herncastle's acquiring the gem through deception and
murder establishes the pattern of repeated thefts as symbolic of England's
imperial conquests and the Moonstone itself as the symbol of a national rather
than a personal crime. Perhaps to Collins, and ultimately to his less
prejudiced and more open-minded readers, the British Raj is not civilising and
benevolent, but economic and military imperialism at its worst. In the idol, it
inspires faith in the community of believers; as a useless bauble, it excites
the Christian sins of lust, envy, greed, and even murder.
India in The Moonstone serves much the same function that certain elements
provide in Gothic fiction. Its mysteriousness, mysticism and availability of
curses and omens, furnish the background that once belonged to castles, remote
areas, winding passageways, Mediterranean-type killers, and medieval
premonitions. The Moonstone diamond is embedded as deeply in superstition, as
it was in the forehead of a fourhanded Indian god typifying the moon. It serves
something of the function of the statue in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto,
which is often regarded as the tale that began the Gothic genre. The Indian
connection, however, gave Collins an additional dimension for his
crime-detection novel, for it suggested light-dark imagery, aspects of surface
versus subsurface, external events versus background, history, and shadows. If
nothing else, India’s complex history reinforced the pressure of the past upon
the present.
In The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Catherine Peters sees
the novel The Moonstone as subverting not merely the conventions of the
Sensation Novel (the sub genre that Collins had been pivotal in creating) but
also the traditional tenets of nineteenth-century British imperialism. The
Brahmins are hardly mindless primitives, and the British army is not shown
intervening to prevent bloodshed between rival factions, nor are the conquering
English superior, enlightened beings attempting to confer the benefits of
European culture and Christian morality upon benighted savages. Whereas the
focus of the Sensation Novel had been sexual indiscretion (illegitimacy,
bigamy, adultery), the centre of The Moonstone is crime and detection. Perhaps
the new genre and Collins's apparently ambivalent attitudes owe something to
context in which his readers would have viewed any subject associated with
India after the 1857 Sepoy rebellion, produced by an English failure to
understand the deeply religious nature of India's Muslims and Hindus. This
novel represents what was part of a continuing interest in India. However,
Collins was evidently changeable somewhat in his view of India. In A Sermon for
Sepoys, another of his writings, Collins chose to portray India in quite
another light when addressing the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. In this, he
demonstrates the volatile quality of this valuable "property" and
also is partly responsible for providing English writers with the idea of the
"murderous Indian."
Collins's mythical Moonstone stands for an India that is not the world's most
populous democracy, as we know it today, but the India of the Raj. To Collins's
readers, whether the common reader of the serial instalments in All the Year
Round from 4 January to 8 August, or the more privileged reader of the
triple-decker (16 July, 1868), mention of India would have instantly conjured
up the terrific events of the series of mid 19th century mutinies; the Cawnpore
garrison massacre, the horrors of the well at Bibighar, and the ensuing siege
of Lucknow. Could Collins’ readers possibly identify themselves with the
novel's faithful Brahmins? The reasons that led to these rebellions would be
overlooked from the first and eventually absorbed into the myth of
blood-thirsty, raving rebels so well captured and disseminated by Collins and
his contemporaries in many of their writings.
The British Raj vanished as a direct result of the altruism and idealism of
Mahatma Ghandi, who saw, as no other leader of his age had done, the necessity
for interracial conciliation and transcendent faith if India were to arise from
bloody, mutually destructive, strife and take her rightful place in the society
of nations. Today, Collins's The Moonstone may be viewed not as a response to a
national insurgency and/or European determination to keep the native in his
place, but rather as a love story between two people who only come to see each
other for what they are after misjudgements, misunderstandings, accidental and
intended deceptions, and considerable self-sacrifice.
Bibliography
Page references to passages from The Moonstone come from the Oxford University
Press, 1999 edition of the novel.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Sutherland, John. “Introduction and A Note on the Composition” Wilkie Collins’
The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Stewart, J. I. M. “A Note on Sources.” Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, rpt. 1973. Pp. 527-8.
Fraser, Antonia, ed. The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England. New York,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Peters, Catherine. The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London,
Minerva, 1991.